East, West (16 page)

He was a huge man whose skin had started hanging too loosely on his face, a giant living in a tiny thatched cottage and forever bumping his head. No wonder he was irascible at times; he was in Hell, a Gulliver trapped in that rose-garden Lilliput of croquet hoops, church bells, sepia photographs and old battle-trumpets.

The weekend was fitful and awkward until the Dodo asked if I played chess. Slightly awestruck at the prospect of playing a Field Marshal, I nodded; and ninety minutes later, to my amazement, won the game.

I went into the kitchen, strutting somewhat, planning to boast a little to the old soldier’s long-time housekeeper, Mrs Liddell. But as soon as I entered she said: ‘Don’t tell me. You never went and won?’

‘Yes,’ I said, affecting nonchalance. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I did.’

‘Gawd,’ said Mrs Liddell. ‘Now there’ll be hell to
pay. You go back in there and ask him for another game, and this time make sure you lose.’

I did as I was told, but was never invited to Beccles again.

Still, the defeat of the Dodo gave me new confidence at the chessboard, so when I returned to Waverley House after finishing my O levels, and was at once invited to play a game by Mixed-Up (Mary had told him about my victory in the Battle of Beccles with great pride and some hyperbole), I said: ‘Sure, I don’t mind.’ How long could it take to thrash the old duffer, after all?

There followed a massacre royal. Mixed-Up did not just beat me; he had me for breakfast, over easy. I couldn’t believe it – the canny opening, the fluency of his combination play, the force of his attacks, my own impossibly cramped, strangled positions – and asked for a second game. This time he tucked into me even more heartily. I sat broken in my chair at the end, close to tears.
Big girls don’t cry
, I reminded myself, but the song went on playing in my head:
That’s just an alibi.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, humiliation weighing down every syllable. ‘The devil in disguise?’

Mixed-Up gave his big, silly grin. ‘Grand Master,’ he said. ‘Long time. Before head.’

‘You’re a Grand Master,’ I repeated, still in a daze. Then in a moment of horror I remembered that I had seen the name Mecir in books of classic games. ‘Nimzo-Indian,’ I said aloud. He beamed and nodded furiously.

‘That Mecir?’ I asked wonderingly.

‘That,’ he said. There was saliva dribbling out of a corner of his sloppy old mouth. This ruined old man was in the books. He was in the books. And even with his mind turned to rubble he could still wipe the floor with me.

‘Now play lady,’ he grinned. I didn’t get it. ‘Mary lady,’ he said. ‘Yes yes certainly.’

She was pouring tea, waiting for my answer. ‘Aya, you can’t play,’ I said, bewildered.

‘Learning, baba,’ she said. ‘What is it, na? Only a game.’

And then she, too, beat me senseless, and with the black pieces, at that. It was not the greatest day of my life.

8

From
100 Most Instructive Chess Games
by Robert Reshevsky, 1961:

M. Mecir – M. Najdorf

Dallas 1950, Nimzo-Indian Defense

The attack of a tactician can be troublesome to meet – that of a strategist even more so. Whereas the tactician’s threats may be unmistakable, the strategist confuses the issue by keeping things in abeyance. He threatens to threaten!

Take this game for instance: Mecir posts a Knight at Q6 to get a grip on the center. Then he establishes a passed Pawn on one wing to occupy his opponent on the Queen side. Finally he stirs up the position on the King-side. What does the poor bewildered opponent do? How can he defend everything at once? Where will the blow fall?

Watch Mecir keep Najdorf on the run, as he shifts the attack from side to side!

Chess had become their private language. Old Mixed-Up, lost as he was for words, retained, on the chessboard, much of the articulacy and subtlety which had vanished from his speech. As Certainly-Mary gained in skill – and she had learned with astonishing speed, I thought bitterly, for someone who couldn’t read or write or pronounce the letter p – she was better able to understand, and respond to, the wit of the reduced maestro with whom she had so unexpectedly forged a bond.

He taught her with great patience, showing-not-telling, repeating openings and combinations and endgame techniques over and over until she began to see the meaning in the patterns. When they played, he handicapped himself, he told her her best moves and demonstrated their consequences, drawing her, step by step, into the infinite possibilities of the game.

Such was their courtship. ‘It is like an adventure, baba,’ Mary once tried to explain to me. ‘It is like going with him to his country, you know? What a place, baap-ré! Beautiful and dangerous and funny and full of fuzzles. For me it is a big-big discovery. What to tell you? I go for the game. It is a wonder.’

I understood, then, how far things had gone between them. Certainly-Mary had never married, and had made it clear to old Mixed-Up that it was too late to start any of that monkey business at her age. The courter was a widower, and had grown-up children somewhere, lost long ago behind the ever-higher walls of Eastern Europe. But in the game of chess they had found a form of flirtation, an endless renewal that precluded the possibility of boredom, a courtly wonderland of the ageing heart.

What would the Dodo have made of it all? No doubt it would have scandalised him to see chess, chess of all
games, the great formalisation of war, transformed into an art of love.

As for me: my defeats by Certainly-Mary and her courter ushered in further humiliations. Durré and Muneeza went down with the mumps, and so, finally, in spite of my mother’s efforts to segregate us, did I. I lay terrified in bed while the doctor warned me not to stand up and move around if I could possibly help it. ‘If you do,’ he said, ‘your parents won’t need to punish you. You will have punished yourself quite enough.’

I spent the following few weeks tormented day and night by visions of grotesquely swollen testicles and a subsequent life of limp impotence – finished before I’d even started, it wasn’t fair! – which were made much worse by my sisters’ quick recovery and incessant gibes. But in the end I was lucky; the illness didn’t spread to the deep South. ‘Think how happy your hundred and one girlfriends will be, bhai,’ sneered Durré, who knew all about my continued failures in the Rozalia and Chandni departments.

On the radio, people were always singing about the joys of being sixteen years old. I wondered where they were, all those boys and girls of my age having the time of their lives. Were they driving around America in Studebaker convertibles? They certainly weren’t in my neighbourhood. London, W8 was Sam Cooke country
that summer.
Another Saturday night
 … There might be a mop-top love-song stuck at number one, but I was down with lonely Sam in the lower depths of the charts, how-I-wishing I had someone, etc., and generally feeling in a pretty goddamn dreadful way.

9

‘Baba, come quick.’

It was late at night when Aya Mary shook me awake. After many urgent hisses, she managed to drag me out of sleep and pull me, pajama’ed and yawning, down the hall. On the landing outside our flat was Mixed-Up the courter, huddled up against a wall, weeping. He had a black eye and there was dried blood on his mouth.

‘What happened?’ I asked Mary, shocked.

‘Men,’ wailed Mixed-Up. ‘Threaten. Beat.’

He had been in his lounge earlier that evening when the sporting Maharaja of P— burst in to say, ‘If anybody comes looking for me, okay, any tough-guy type guys, okay, I am out, okay? Oh you tea. Don’t let them go upstairs, okay? Big tip, okay?’

A short time later, the old Maharaja of B— also arrived in Mecir’s lounge, looking distressed.

‘Suno, listen on,’ said the Maharaja of B—. ‘You don’t know where I am, samajh liya? Understood? Some low persons may inquire. You don’t know. I am abroad, achha? On extended travels abroad. Do your job, porter. Handsome recompense.’

Late at night two tough-guy types did indeed turn up. It seemed the hairy Prince P— had gambling debts. ‘Out,’ Mixed-Up grinned in his sweetest way. The tough-guy types nodded, slowly. They had long hair and thick lips like Mick Jagger’s. ‘He’s a busy gent. We should of made an appointment,’ said the first type to the second. ‘Didn’t I tell you we should of called?’

‘You did,’ agreed the second type. ‘Got to do these things right, you said, he’s royalty. And you was right, my son, I put my hand up, I was dead wrong. I put my hand up to that.’

‘Let’s leave our card,’ said the first type. ‘Then he’ll know to expect us.’

‘Ideal,’ said the second type, and smashed his fist into old Mixed-Up’s mouth. ‘You tell him,’ the second type said, and struck the old man in the eye. ‘When he’s in. You mention it.’

He had locked the front door after that; but much later, well after midnight, there was a hammering.
Mixed-Up called out, ‘Who?’

‘We are close friends of the Maharaja of B—’ said a voice. ‘No, I tell a lie. Acquaintances.’

‘He calls upon a lady of our acquaintance,’ said a second voice. ‘To be precise.’

‘It is in that connection that we crave audience,’ said the first voice.

‘Gone,’ said Mecir. ‘Jet plane. Gone.’

There was a silence. Then the second voice said, ‘Can’t be in the jet set if you never jump on a jet, eh? Biarritz, Monte, all of that.’

‘Be sure and let His Highness know’, said the first voice, ‘that we eagerly await his return.’

‘With regard to our mutual friend,’ said the second voice. ‘Eagerly.’

What does the poor bewildered opponent do?
The words from the chess book popped unbidden into my head.
How can he defend everything at once? Where will the blow fall? Watch Mecir keep Najdorf on the run, as he shifts the attack from side to side!

Mixed-Up returned to his lounge and on this occasion, even though there had been no use of force, he began to weep. After a time he took the elevator up to the fourth floor and whispered through our letterbox to Certainly-Mary sleeping on her mat.

‘I didn’t want to wake Sahib,’ Mary said. ‘You know his trouble, na? And Begum Sahiba is so tired at end of the day. So now you tell, baba, what to do?’

What did she expect me to come up with? I was sixteen years old. ‘Mixed-Up must call the police,’ I unoriginally offered.

‘No, no, baba,’ said Certainly-Mary emphatically. ‘If the courter makes a scandal for Maharaja-log, then in the end it is the courter only who will be out on his ear.’

I had no other ideas. I stood before them feeling like a fool, while they both turned upon me their frightened, supplicant eyes.

‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘We’ll think about it in the morning.’
The first pair of thugs were tacticians
, I was thinking.
They were troublesome to meet. But the second pair were scarier; they were strategists. They threatened to threaten.

Nothing happened in the morning, and the sky was clear. It was almost impossible to believe in fists, and menacing voices at the door. During the course of the day both Maharajas visited the porter’s lounge and stuck five-pound notes in Mixed-Up’s waistcoat pocket. ‘Held the fort, good man,’ said Prince P—, and the Maharaja of B— echoed those sentiments: ‘Spot on. All handled now, achha? Problem over.’

The three of us – Aya Mary, her courter, and me – held a council of war that afternoon and decided that no further action was necessary. The hall porter was the front line in any such situation, I argued, and the front line had held. And now the risks were past. Assurances had been given. End of story.

‘End of story,’ repeated Certainly-Mary doubtfully, but then, seeking to reassure Mecir, she brightened. ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Most certainly! All-done, finis.’ She slapped her hands against each other for emphasis. She asked Mixed-Up if he wanted a game of chess; but for once the courter didn’t want to play.

10

After that I was distracted, for a time, from the story of Mixed-Up and Certainly-Mary by violence nearer home.

My middle sister Muneeza, now eleven, was entering her delinquent phase a little early. She was the true inheritor of my father’s black rage, and when she lost control it was terrible to behold. That summer she seemed to pick fights with my father on purpose; seemed prepared, at her young age, to test her strength against his. (I intervened in her rows with Abba only
once, in the kitchen. She grabbed the kitchen scissors and flung them at me. They cut me on the thigh. After that I kept my distance.)

As I witnessed their wars I felt myself coming unstuck from the idea of family itself. I looked at my screaming sister and thought how brilliantly self-destructive she was, how triumphantly she was ruining her relations with the people she needed most.

And I looked at my choleric, face-pulling father and thought about British citizenship. My existing Indian passport permitted me to travel only to a very few countries, which were carefully listed on the second right-hand page. But I might soon have a British passport and then, by hook or by crook, I would get away from him. I would not have this face-pulling in my life.